ROYALTON — In a 2016 conversation with a Valley News reporter, Maybelle Dumont stated proudly that she had never moved away from her family home on Royalton Turnpike.
“Born right where I live,” she said. “I never got weaned.”
This kind of straightforward declaration was characteristic of how Dumont spoke and of how she lived her life. She radiated positive energy to such an extent that her life seemed simple.
“She was like a great, big ray of sunshine,” Merry Ferranti, the eldest of Dumont’s four children, said in an interview. “She was always happy, and I don’t know how she did it.”
From an early age, Dumont showed a determination to lead life on her own terms, but within a family that wasn’t all that nurturing, to put it charitably. For much of her life, her sunny outlook manifested itself as a long series of big meals that she cooked, often for little pay, for the benefit of organizations and of people in need.
Maybelle Rose Dumont died on July 24, 2025, at Menig Nursing Home in Randolph Center. She was 88. She suffered the first of two strokes in February 2024, and the second just 11 days before her death.
She was born in Royalton, in the house she grew up in, in 1936. Her grandfather, Ephrem Gagne, had moved his family from Holyoke, Mass., to the former Waldo farm in Royalton in 1911. Her grandmother, Rose Gagne, started a route to Bethel, selling eggs, butter, fruits and vegetables and baked goods. “Royalton, Vermont,” Hope Nash’s 1975 town history, notes that Rose “drove one horse with a pung sleigh in winter; they broke out their road by tying a small spruce tree to each runner of the sleigh, down to the turnpike, which was kept open with the town snow rollers.” Rose “did her baking and churning and washing late at night, singing as she worked.”
Ephrem was born in Quebec, and French was the primary language in the Gagne home. (Gagne is pronounced GAHN-yay.) Albert Gagne, the seventh of Ephrem and Rose’s nine children, moved his family down the hill, to Royalton Turnpike, in 1923. He and his wife, Ruth, started what became known as Gagne Gardens. Their farm of more than 200 acres eventually included 26 acres of fruits and vegetables, a big farmstand, a truck route to Barre, Christmas trees, chickens, sheep and dairy cows.
Maybelle was the fifth and last of Albert and Ruth’s five children. For reasons Maybelle’s children don’t really understand, Ruth never took a liking to her youngest child.
Early on, Ruth was against Maybelle having a horse, Ferranti said. But Maybelle worked around her. Albert paid her 10 cents a quart for picking raspberries and blackberries, and she earned enough to pay $42 for a small bay horse she named Flicka, after the 1941 novel, and 1943 film, “My Friend Flicka.”
She attended school at the one-room schoolhouse nearby, a structure she would later live in after the school closed in 1949, and at the high school in South Royalton.
The family operated on the tradition of back-breaking labor set by Rose Gagne. Albert got some help with the gardens, but liked to do a lot of the work himself. “I guess that’s where my mom got her strong work ethic, through my grandfather,” Andrew Dumont, the youngest of Maybelle’s children, said in an interview.
How she handled her mother’s antipathy toward her isn’t clear. Maybelle spent a lot of time out and about. A photo of her on Flicka shows her at the farmhouse her grandparents had sold to the Clark family. Maybelle was friends with many of the other children in her corner of town.
As a teen, she worked as a babysitter for the Dumville family, who lived on Waterman Road, across the White River. Even then, Maybelle was a positive force.
“She would always have us draw, paint, color, run around outside playing cops and robbers, bake cookies,” John Dumville said in an interview. He was 5 or 6 at the time, so Maybelle would have been 19 or so.
Someone else babysat the Dumville children so their parents could attend Maybelle’s wedding. She and Richard Dumont were married in July 1956. She was 20 and he was 26. Their daughter, Merry, was born in December. Their second child, Thomas, was born less than a year later.
At the time, Maybelle and Richard lived with her parents. After a couple of years, they moved into the old schoolhouse, within sight of the farm.
“My grandmother wouldn’t let me go with them, and I don’t know why,” Ferranti said. This arrangement continued through her youth. Eventually, Albert and Ruth would spend two months each winter in Florida, and Merry lived with her parents for those two months.
Richard Dumont was another story. “I can’t tell you much about him,” Ferranti said, “because it’s all trauma. He was a monster.”
It isn’t clear what abuse Maybelle might have suffered. Her youth took place during an era less inclined to emotional honesty, so Maybelle said little about her upbringing. Her children are aware, to a point.
“Her mother was a tyrant,” Michael Dumont, the third of Maybelle’s four children, said in an interview at the Gagne homestead. (The farm closed down in the 1980s. The Gagne Gardens sign is still there on the barn, though the farm now consists of hayfields.)
Growing up in her grandparents’ house, “I heard it constantly,” Ferranti said. “My mother ‘wasn’t worth anything.'”
Albert doted on his youngest child, but also was the first person in Vermont to have his driver’s license revoked for life for repeated drunk driving offenses, Merry and Michael said.
When her children were still small, Maybelle found the job that would set the course for her life. Down the hill and across the river from her home was Percy’s Atlantic Diner.
The diner, which was where Royalton Village Pizza now stands, was a community place, but also a stop for travelers and truckers, state troopers and the state road crew, which had a key so they could get in late at night to make coffee and get something to eat, Michael said.
When owner Percy Abair started catering events, Dumont helped out and learned how to cook for a crowd. This skill met with her craving for company to form a lasting career.
She ended up preparing weekly meals for the Rotary chapters in Bethel and Randolph and cooked for the Randolph Fish and Game Club. She ran an untold number of church and community suppers. She became particularly famous for chicken pot pie, chicken with gravy and vegetables cooked under biscuit dough in huge pans, intended to serve hundreds. When the Knights of Columbus in Randolph held a supper, they put her name in the ads.
“I’d like a nickel for every biscuit she made,” said Michael, who often helped her at suppers.
At the farm, Maybelle would hold “hill picnics” and invite everyone who lived on Royalton Hill, a road that stretched from the White River into Barnard. She also would hold benefit dinners for people who had suffered setbacks, such as a house fire, or a hospitalization.
The impetus behind the benefit dinners might have stemmed, in part, from the support the Dumont family received when their own home, the old schoolhouse, burned down in 1977. They tried to save as much as they could. Maybelle burned her hand.
“I remember when flames started going over our heads, I pulled her out,” Ferranti said.
The outpouring of help for the family was overwhelming. “I was barefoot, and a friend of the family gave me the boots right off of her feet,” Andrew Dumont, the youngest child, said in an interview.
The Dumonts lived with Maybelle’s parents until they could put a mobile home on the schoolhouse parcel. (The old farmhouse would burn down in 2011, an electrical fire in the summer, as with the schoolhouse. The new home on the site was built with an eye toward Maybelle’s mobility, and she and Michael lived there until she moved into a nursing home. Michael lives there now and Andrew lives in the nearby mobile home.)
Dumont’s children describe her as someone who was determined, even stubborn, but at the same time seemed always to be happy. She stayed home, though she liked to travel. She likely never boarded a plane, save for a single, ill-fated sky-diving outing in 2015 that left her with a broken hip and a broken bone in her neck.
Her joy and grit seemed interwoven. Her final stroke claimed her speech, but Dumont remained communicative.
“She could smile, and she would watch us,” Michael said. “She was a fighter, right up till the end.”